Grazed from Engadget.  Author: Nicole Lee.

Nearly a year after HP announced its cloud computing plans, it has finally gotten serious about the internet by creating a specialized business unit around it, according to AllThingsD.

Dubbed the Converged Cloud unit, it’ll be headed by Saar Gillai who has been promoted to senior VP. The unit will manage all things cloud, from hardware and services to its marketing and networking partners. Judging from its recent financial woes, perhaps this renewed gamble on internet services will push it further into the black.

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author: Ted Samson.

OpenStack cloud vendor Mirantis has received a hefty $10 million capital injection from the investment arms of Dell, Intel, and WestSummit. The bonanza sets up the company to take on OpenStack rivals such as Rackspace and Piston Computing. What’s more, it could garner greater interest in and support for the OpenStack open source cloud platform, which rivals offerings from former OpenStack supporter Citrix with CloudStack, Microsoft, Eucalyptus, and reigning cloud king Amazon Web Services.

A backer of OpenStack since its birth in 2010, Mirantis claims to have the largest pool of engineering expertise in OpenStack and boasts working on more than 30 deployments over the past 18 months for big-name customers such as NASA, WebEx, Gap, PayPal, and AT&T. The company also has dedicated developers contributing to OpenStack Quantum LBaaS, and it helps run the Bay Area OpenStack user group in Silicon Valley…

Grazed from BusinessSolutions.  Author: Editorial Staff.

Cloud computing is a hot topic. In the retail and restaurant space, the term is often misused and misunderstood. Some resellers are resistant to cloud-based POS due to a lack of knowledge and experience. In an attempt to educate retail and restaurant POS dealers on what cloud really means to them, Business Solutions magazine recently spoke with Mike Burris, CEO of Aeris POS Systems/Essential Elements, a cloud-based POS software provider.

Why should POS dealers consider this "new" way of business?

Mike Burris, CEO, Aeris POS Systems/Essential Elements: Change is nothing new for POS dealers.  If you chronicle just the past 15 years of technological, financial, and social changes that have affected the POS industry, it illustrates that POS resellers have always been challenged to innovate in order to compete.  Truthfully, that has been the case for decades.  It’s why organizations like the RSPA (circa 1950) were formed, and why publications like Business Solutions are important information resources for POS resellers…

Grazed from InformationWeek.  Author: Charles Babcock.

DropBox announced Friday morning that it had fixed problems in its ability to serve clients storing images and files in their DropBox accounts, after a 15.5 hour outage.  At 7:09 a.m. Pacific, the team working on restoring the service tweeted, "Thanks all for your patience. We’re happy to let you know that all issues have now been fixed!" at @DropBoxOps. The ability to upload or synch files had been out since 3:30 p.m. Pacific Thursday.

DropBox first acknowledged the problem in a tweet at 3:26 p.m. Thursday, saying, "Client Syncing, and Uploading via the website, will be affected for approximately the next hour. Thank you for your patience." The next hour turned into a long one for many DropBox users…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

When Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt returned to Beijing Thursday from his controversial three-day "private visit" to North Korea he said that he told officials in Pyongyang that they must open the country up to Internet access or it would be "harder for them to catch up economically. We made that alternative very, very clear."

The Internet is only accessible to the government, military and universities. Its use is monitored. There’s a national intranet with an information portal. The Internet isn’t accessible through the country’s cellular network although Schmidt said it could be modified. Evidently it services about one million phones out of a population of about 25 million…

Grazed from DigitalHome. Author: Cliff Boodoosingh.

In an effort to give Canadian businesses a competitive digital technology edge, free cloud computing resources are being made available through a government-sponsored accelerator program. The Digital Accelerator for Innovation and Research (DAIR) program is offered by CANARIE, operator of Canada’s Advanced Research and Innovation Network and supported by tech firms Compute Canada and Cybera.

Hundreds of projects will be funded across Canada over the next three years. “Building or even paying for computing infrastructure can be a huge cost and time impediment for high-tech innovators. The DAIR program effectively removes that hurdle,” says Jim Roche, President and CEO of CANARIE…

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Chris Talbot.

SecurEnvoy, a provider of tokenless authentication products, has partnered with PasswordBank to take tokenless, two-factor authentication to the cloud and provide it as a service to PasswordBank’s customers, complementing PasswordBank’s identity management solutions.

According to the companies, PasswordBank customers will be able to access cloud services including Google Apps (NASDAQ: GOOG), Microsoft Office 365 (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) through PasswordBank’s single sign-on platform and then use SMS messages for two-factor authentication. The goal is to provide business-grade security that doesn’t require end users to carry a physical token at all times. That physical token is, instead, their mobile phone or other mobile device (presumably saving them from the Batman utility belt look we were all so proud of in the ’90s)…

Grazed from Sys Con Media. Author: Maureen O’Gara.

Google wiggled out of antitrust charges over its core search business in the US last week but its luck may not hold in Europe where Joaquín Almunia, the head of the European Commission’s antitrust unit, told the Financial Times Thursday that "We are still investigating, but my conviction is [Google] are diverting traffic" to give its own vertical search services preferential treatment.

"They are monetizing this kind of business," he said, "the strong position they have in the general search market and this is not only a dominant position, I think – I fear – there is an abuse of this dominant position." He added that he’s not talking about Google’s sacred algorithms but "the way they present their own services."…

Grazed from InfoWorld. Author: David Linthicum.

With the rise of cloud computing comes a rise in tools and models that estimate the cost benefit of the technology. Most are created and promoted by cloud providers that sell their services, and a few come from analysts and consulting organizations. Whatever their source, their ROI calculations are based on the same assumption: Cloud computing avoids hardware and software investments, and because you pay only for the resources you use, the cost of those resources should align directly with the amount you require.

Those assumptions sound great, but the resulting ROI calculations are drastic oversimplifications of the problems the cloud is there to solve. In fact, these ROI calculators confuse businesses about the real value of the cloud and mislead both IT and business units…